A first look at GNOME 2.16

GNOME 2.16 is upon us! Linux.Ars has a look at the latest version of the …

GNOME 2.16

The GNOME 2.16 release is almost upon us, and readers have asked for a prerelease preview. Although GNOME 2.16 is a minor update, it adds some highly desirable functionality and touts much-needed aesthetic improvements in addition to a veritable mountain of bug fixes.

GNOME 2.16 features a vastly improved default icon theme based on Tango and the Tango palette. The new theme adheres to the Freedesktop.org icon naming specification, which will facilitate its use by other compliant desktop platforms. Folders are still brown, but the colors are much softer and lot easier on the eyes. Many scalable icons were added as well, significantly improving the appearance of stretched or zoomed icons in Nautilus. Unfortunately, most of the Nautilus emblems haven't been replaced yet. Though not exactly related to the GNOME 2.16 release, it is worth mentioning that the GIMP was also a recent recipient of Tango icon love. The icon artists certainly have been a busy bunch lately, and I look forward to seeing more of their excellent work as the Tangoification continues in future releases.

GNOME 2.16 also includes a minor update of the cairo-enabled Clearlooks theme designed to be less distracting. The most noticeable difference is the lack of shiny blueness in the scrollbars. Although I understand the rationale for changing the scrollbars, I think that the new version of Clearlooks is a bit too plain. I tend to prefer Ubuntulooks because I like gratuitous gradients, colorful rollover highlighting, and rounded edges. Users that are looking for a slicker alternative to Clearlooks might also want to check out the impressive new cairo-based Murrine GTK theme engine, created by Andrea Cimitan. Murrine is one of the most visually elegant theme engines I have seen in a while, and it doesn't compromise performance. Those of you that share my dislike for salmon-colored highlighting will probably prefer this dark blue remix. Murrine is available in other colors from the GNOME-Look web site.

In addition to new icons and an updated GTK theme, GNOME got an infusion of compositing goodness, including support for toggling compositor support at runtime, support for wobbling and exploding affects, magnification, configurable transparency for windows and menus, fading effects, and shrinking effects for minimization. Although these features are all implemented, they are still highly experimental and not enabled or by default. Users that wish to utilize the new built-in compositing features will have to compile Metacity with --enable-compositor. These features will hopefully be enabled in the 2.18 release. Metacity received a lot of bugfixes and other minor improvements. Compositing support has also been added to GNOME terminal, which now supports real transparency.

Numerous interface improvements have been made to Evolution, GNOME's e-mail client. Utilizing cairo, the developers have added gradients and shadows to calendar appointments. Although this feature is purely aesthetic and not particularly useful, it serves as a very good example of how cairo can be used to provide a little bit of polish and zest to otherwise dull desktop applications. Other Evolution interface improvements have a more significant impact on usability. The newly added vertical pane view reduces the amount of scrolling required to read mail, and the newly added month widgets in the calendar view sidebar simplify navigation. The latest version of Evolution also has improved search support and a simple drop-down menu for fast message filtering. Evolution's frequently criticized IMAP implementation received a much-needed performance improvement, augmenting IMAP download speed by about 48 percent. The Evolution Data Server back-end also benefited from optimization, and it now consumes less memory.

GNOME 2.16 is the first release to include a C# application. The newly added Tomboy note-taking application could eventually replace the sticky notes applet. After much discussion, the GNOME developers decided to add the GTK C# sharp bindings and Mono as official GNOME dependencies. Additional C# and Mono applications like F-Spot, Banshee, and Beagle may be included in future releases.

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A new permissions dialog was implemented for the Nautilus file manager, finally bringing ACL support to the GUI. Additionally, a button was added to the Nautilus location bar that toggles between path buttons and the URI textbox. Increasing Nautilus startup speed has been a major focus lately, and the new version apparently includes some improvements in that area. Summer of Code participant Philip Ezolt made an extensive analysis of Nautilus startup performance, and has produced a number of interesting recommendations that could contribute to additional performance improvements in future versions. An assortment of other bugfixes and improvements were also added, and the extension interface has been augmented in various ways. I'm particularly pleased with the addition of drag and drop reordering support for the places sidebar.

The GNOME power manager got lots of new D-Bus functionality as well as support for new power consumption graphs rendered with cairo. Support for CPU frequency scaling management is potentially in the works for the next major release. Developer Richard Hughes has written a number of particularly good blog entries about GNOME power management recently that might be of interest to those of you that want to learn more about the topic.

The GNOME dictionary also sees a much-needed update, with a completely new sidebar spelling widget that automatically lists similar words when no definition is found. Although a related words list feature once appeared in previous versions, the code was removed during an overhaul and was just now reimplemented. The GNOME dictionary panel applet also has some nice improvements.

The properties dialog in Totem has been replaced with a new sidebar page, and totem now uses HAL for CD/DVD detection. Support has been added for several playlist formats, including the XML Shareable Playlist Format (XSPF), Quicktime Metalink playlists, and RealAudio playlists. A lot of other work was done to improve support for playback of embedded web video. Although I like Totem's clean and elegant interface, I think that the application leaves a lot to be desired. Instead, I prefer GXine, which has more features, fewer bugs, and better support for subtitles. Totem really needs better tracking support, an equalizer, more extensive D-Bus integration, and broader support for subtitle rendering configuration before it will be able to really compete with more advanced video players like Xine and MPlayer.

A handful of other minor improvements for the 2.16 release contribute to a general increase in the quality of GNOME. The launcher creation dialog has been cleaned up, GEdit now has a file browser sidebar plugin, the GTK file chooser received a new button for toggling the path input text box (this is really a GTK 2.10 feature), windows from the taskbar can now be dragged to other virtual desktops in the pager applet, Yelp got improved performance and search features, Epiphany now has better printing support and experimental spellcheck functionality, and Bug-buddy was the recipient of a user interface overhaul.

Overall, I think that GNOME 2.16 is a good release with some nice additions, but I don't think it has any killer features that justify an immediate upgrade. I'm going to wait for the official Ubuntu Edgy release in October rather than upgrading early. Of the new features included in GNOME 2.16, I think that the vertical view mode for Evolution is probably the one that will benefit me the most. I'm looking forward to seeing the plans for 2.18.

For my review, I used a VMWare virtual machine image kindly provided by Brent Smith of the GNOME documentation team. Those of you that want to dive into GNOME 2.16 and check it out right away might want to grab an Ubuntu Daily LiveCD image.